Wood Sprites

Aunt Kitty nodded and gathered Louise close. “I know, honey bear. People don’t always think that clearly when it comes to hate. These terrorists hate elves, so their first target will always be something related to them.”

* * *

At some point along the way, unnoticed by Aunt Kitty or Louise, Jillian had gained a big bandage just above her left eye. To strangers, Jillian probably looked like a poor little war orphan. To Louise, the bandage gave Jillian pirate flair.

As the museum security stopped them at the entrance because of Tesla, Jillian explained with a convincing waver in her voice, “After what happened at our school yesterday, we feel safer with him. Can’t we please keep him with us?”

Aunt Kitty eyed the bandage with hidden dismay, but played along. “They go to Perelman. The bomb was right across the street. They had a rough day yesterday and wanted to do something to take their minds off the explosion.”

The girls had to produce their Perelman School for the Gifted student ID badges to verify this claim. After a quick conference with the powers that be and a search of Tesla’s storage chamber, they were allowed to take their “beloved” nanny-bot into the museum.

“Girl, you are going to be dangerous when you’re eighteen.” Aunt Kitty seemed torn between dismay and amusement. “Turn the world upside down and inside out.”

“I’m really hoping that I don’t have to wait that long,” Jillian said.

Aunt Kitty laughed then.

Louise cringed inside. She hated that they had to lie to their aunt. In many ways, she was a cohort in crime, but only to a point. Much as she loved to kidnap them away for adventures, she always kept in mind that they weren’t her kids. She carefully never crossed any line that their mother set. Thus she never gave them Coke to drink, never let them stay up past their bedtimes, and never, never would let them rob a museum.

They’d programmed Tesla to search out security cameras and map out their field of vision. With what he was recording, they hoped to be able to find all the blind spots in the museum. His optic system abided by the museum rules on cameras since he wasn’t using a flash. If the security people had known how his guidance system could be exploited, they probably wouldn’t have allowed him to enter the building.

The twins picked up maps handed out at the ticket booth and glided upstairs on the escalators. Everywhere Louise looked, there was a security guard. The colony exhibit was in the Special Exhibition Gallery 3, which would also be the site of the Elfhome’s Lost Treasures. Judging by the maps they’d studied a few nights ago, the museum chose it because it was the largest space for traveling exhibits.

“You really wanted to see this?” Aunt Kitty asked as they pondered the first display.

“Yes.” Jillian hesitated and then said in what sounded like the truth but wasn’t, “We really thought it would be more interesting than this. And it closes at the end of the month, so this was almost the last chance to see it — just in case it was more interesting.”

The first display was a very detailed model of the Chinese hyperphase gate in orbit. It looked very much like a bicycle wheel with a large inner ring that was the gate part of the station. Dozens of thin spokes connected the inner ring to an outer one where the crew lived. The long, slender needle of a colony ship was poised to thread through the eye of the gate and jump to the Alpha Centauri star system. A sign identified the ship as the Minghe Hao, which had left Earth three years ago.

While the ship and gate were in scale to each other, the Earth below was not. The two threw a massive shadow down onto the planet, blotting out everything from Malaysia to the Philippines. Because of the scale problem, the International Shipyard loomed beside the gate, closer than it really was. The next colony ship, the Shenzhou Hao

, was being pieced together from segments shipped up in large prefabricated pieces from China. Obviously the scene was totally a figment of the model maker’s imagination, as the Shenzhou Hao hadn’t been started when the Minghe Hao slipped through the gate with little fanfare. The Shenzhou Hao wasn’t finished; even through its original departure date had been years ago.

Louise wasn’t sure why the display seemed so uninteresting. She studied it for a moment, noticing that they hadn’t added weather patterns to Earth, nor sunlight to indicate the Earth’s revolution. Maybe they thought people would be confused by what geostationary orbit meant if the entire display spun. There was no movement at all, not even lights blinking in the Shipyard to indicate construction of the various sections of the spaceship.

She had a sudden and awful feeling that she was looking at a frozen moment in time. A doomed ship, forever stuck on the event horizon of disaster. Had the Minghe Hao actually arrived safely? Or had it crashed?